


i gave a speech and she gave me a pill

by gayforroxane



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: dad! Eddie? i guess, eddie delivers a TED talk, no pennywise and im really sorry but georgie is still dead, post-college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-09 18:39:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13487382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayforroxane/pseuds/gayforroxane
Summary: "Unless you got kidnapped by a motherfucking killer clown, I don't want to hear whatever shitty excuse you've lined up for flirting with me for two years, fucking me for a day straight and then never speaking to me again.""I'm - I'm so sorry, Eds."or, Eddie delivers a TED talk about being successful, cute and gay (sort of), Richie calls, and Georgie's wake is a reunion





	i gave a speech and she gave me a pill

**Author's Note:**

> okay please don't hate me it's not maggie tozier im so sorry it'll happen i swear! but have a thing i wrote a while ago and then posted and then unposted and which i am reposting

 

It's easy to see someone being abused in a TV show, or a movie, or read about it in a book and say, 'That would never happen to me' or 'I would never let anyone treat me like that,' but the reality of it is: you probably have.

You let your brother talk down to you, or a partner manipulate you, or a parent control you. Anyone who tells you that these aren't signs of abuse probably couldn't shove their own head farther up their ass if they tried. 

_(Laughter from audience)_

 My mother was a hypochondriac and a mysophobe and she had Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy, or MSBP, which is a form of psychological abuse associated with making a loved one, typically a child, believe that they're sick. She told me that the feeling I got in my chest when I ran or laughed wasn't the childish glee of spending time with friends, but severe, dangerous asthma. 

I used an inhaler for close to ten years. 

_(Pause, Dr. Kaspbrak takes a deep breath before continuing)_

She bought me glasses - bifocals, actually - when I was eleven, and a fanny pack to store my medication when I was eight. She taught me about grey water and the ways that a cut can get infected and the dangers of spending time in dirt or grass. She taught me that the human body was a terrifying, horrible thing. She taught me that my body was dirty and ugly and wrong - that it was sick, and that she was my salvation for becoming clean and strong and right. 

When I tell people that I grew up with an abusive mother, they expect that she called me things and maybe pushed me around a little bit, but my mother did that exactly once and it wasn't at all like you'd think. 

My mother's abuse was casual. It was  _easy._  She would watch when I ate and comment when I lost or gained weight. She made sure I always had my medication and insisted upon knowing my whereabouts at all times. She didn't let me leave the house without kissing her on the cheek, and she regularly looked through my things without telling me. She would randomly restrict my ability to spend time with my friends, locking me in the house, sometimes in my room, in the suffocating heat of a summer in Maine, and let me wallow in my sweat. 

These things are fairly innocent, if you aren't in the middle of them. I've had people shake and their heads and say to me, "That wasn't abuse - she was just overprotective." I've even had people get angry with me, and tell me that I no right to say that I had been abused because I had no idea what abuse was really like. 

Let me let you all in on a little secret: abuse is not a pissing contest, or a comparason of dick sizes. Joe with the micropenis in the third row over there isn't more or less abused than Michael with the foot-long.  _(Audience laughs)_

I had other friends who were abused - both with shitty dads. Richie's dad used to beat him anytime he was home, which wasn't often, but it was enoug. Bev's dad used to rape her until she hit him over the head with a toilet seat.  But they aren't more or less abused from me just because Rich likes to pretend he's got a giant dick and Bev's  _metaphorical_ dick is literally pornstar worthy.

( _Audience laughs_ )

My mother did a lot of things to me - she insisted on being in the room while I showered or bathed until I moved out. She would have me strip in the living room to inspect me for cuts, rashes or bruises, and if she found anything out of place, she would feed me pills - typically a double or triple dose of anxiety medication, which knocked me the fuck out. I often woke up after these incidences in my mother's bed, naked, with no memory of what had happened in the four hours I had lost. I don't know what happened. But I woke up sore enough to guess. And, you know, my mother used to preach being clean like it was a new fucking God, but I never felt clean in her house, no matter how much I showered or how much medication I took.

 It would take me another seven years to feel  _clean_. 

  _(Pause)_

 I'm kind of jumping all over the place, and I'm sorry about that, but I - um - totally forgot to prepare before I arrived, like an hour ago, so I wrote this whole fucking thing on the plane. Luckily, one thing my mother didn't misdiagnose me with was an eidetic memory, so that's something. 

  _Audience laughs. Mr Kaspbrak stops for a drink of water)_

 Actually, my eidetic memory is what got me into medical school - all standardized tests are easier when you can't forget every detail of every textbook you've ever read. It's also super fucking frustrating. I flunked my first test in medical school because I'd made the mistake of reading the  _entire_  textbook, which was like twelve hundred pages long, and I couldn't figure out where each piece of information I needed was stored. I learned very quickly that the key to eidetic memory was in the details. It's easier to find information in a file if there's only a hundred pages to sort through instead of a thousand, or two thousand, and it's the same thing with my brain. I have to be selective. 

 People always point out to me that eidetic memory is 'a blessing and a curse' because you can recall everything, including traumatic events. I always find this funny, because when was the last time you forgot about a traumatic event? Did you forget your childhood bully, or your abusive parent, or your mean sibling or your homophobic uncle or your racist mother? Of course you didn't! The human brain is very good at retaining trauma, at holding it in the memory, but slowly detaching meaning from it. My memories may be more detailed than yours, but I don't remember everything flawlessly. I'm not  _magical_. I forget my phone at home and I forget to pack underwear when I go on trips and I forget to feed my kids sometimes. 

  _(Pause)_

 That was a joke, guys, and I'm really fucking offended nobody laughed -

  _(Audience begins laughing_ )

 I can't believe you all thought that I was bad enough dad that I forgot to feed my kids. Fuck you all. 

  _(Audience and Dr. Kaspbrak laugh. Dr. Kaspbrak shakes his head)_

 People hear about me talking about my mom, and then they hear about me going to medical school and they assume the two must be correlated. 

They're not wrong, of course, I wouldn't have gone to medical school without my mother, but she wasn't  _why_  I went. I went to medical school because she taught me to hate the human body - to be disgusted by all of its processes, all of its strange quirks and preferences, all the ways it ticks and all the strange things it does. She taught me to be afraid of disease and illness and mental health and cancer and atrophy and infection. 

 So I went to medical school to learn why the human body was so inherently valuable, why it was an evolutionary advantage over millions upon millions of other species in the world. 

 I went to medical school to learn about AIDS slash HIV, because I grew up with my mother breathing down my neck about how dangerous it was to be queer. I went to learn about hypochondria and abuse and psychology and vaccines. I went to learn about how many germs are  _actually_ in a person's mouth - it's about a hundred thousand individual bateria per tooth and about thirty two million per mouth, you're welcome, by the way, have fun macking on your partner tonight - and how to be protected from STIs. 

  _That's_  why I went to medical school. 

  _(Pause)_

 I'd been talking about how it took me seven years to get clean, right? Saying it like that always makes me sound like a junkie, but in some ways, I was. Taking double doses of anxiety medication whenever my mom decided I wasn't clean enough and all sorts of other kinds of medication you don't need is really fucking bad for you. I was addicted, basically, to the antidepressants, anti-anxiety and heartburn medication I'd been taking for most of my life. I moved out of my mom's house when I was seventeen, in my senior year, and went to go live with my best friend on his farm, for the last few months of highschool. That was the first time she abused me the way people expect kids get abused - that was the first time she yelled at me. She called me a fag, my best friend a nigger and my boyfriend at the time a filthy jew. And she slapped me, like actually slapped me - I couldn't hear properly for a week and I had a bruise shaped like my mom's hand for three and a half. 

 That was November 17, 2010, so it's been just over ten years since I last spoke to my mom. 

 Those last months of high school, I was still taking the medication. I had already abandoned my mom, I couldn't abandon my drugs, too. Besides, I would have had to talk to her to have my prescriptions canceled and I was even less willing to do that than I was to stop taking them. 

I got accepted into UPenn for their pre-med program, and I graduated  _magnum cum laude_ with my MD when I was twenty-four, which is pretty much why I was asked to do this TED talk for you guys. I'm the youngest-ever graduate from UPenn with an MD, and I'm very gay and very cute, which people tend to like. 

  _(Audience laughs. Inaudible audience member says something and Dr. Kaspbrak laughs and winks)_

 You guys don't see enough LGBTQ people in the media - you don't see us succeeding in jobs that haven't been disguished as almost purely 'for queer people.' There are gay actors, gay musicians, gay dancers - but you don't get to see gay doctors and nurses and teachers, gay people being gay and being normal.

I'm gay but I've lived a pretty normal life - a successful one, luckily - but a normal one. I mean there are some key things that are a little odd - I was seveteen when I started school, and you know, my mother. But I made stupid decisions in my early twenties - I dated someone for three months and married them on our four month anniversary. I had two kids with them before we'd been married for a year. We divorced, surprise surprise, but we get along pretty well and our kids get to be raised in kinda super fucking weird households - I'm a doctor and a professor and very gay. Caspar's got stocks in Google and works on their financial aide team - they're non-binary and queer. But we're pretty normal, or we're a new kind of normal that is starting to become normal and thank God, because I really hate it when people look shocked when I discuss my boyfriends in front of my children or when they look disgusted when Caspar mentions their pronouns. I really hate it. Bring on the new normal, you know?

 The point is, you are the life you create for yourself. You might be sitting in this audience and listening to me talk and relating to every word I say, thanking whoever that you got to hear someone who sounded like you talk on a stage like this. Or maybe you're sitting there thinking that I'm a fucking quack and whoever let me attend medical school was a fucking lunatic and well, you're not wrong. 

  _(Audience laughs_ ). 

 Fifteen-year-old Eddie Kaspbrak, who woke up naked next to his mother, was terrifying, I'm told, in his determination to make it to medical school, to leave Fuck-All, Maine, and grow up to be someone who mattered, someone who was more than short, and queer, and abused. 

I'm still short, still queer, still dealing with the effects of abuse, but I'm also 27, a doctor, a professor, a dad, a divorcee, a big fucking fan of the Beatles and David Bowie and Ella Fitzgerald, a reader, a writer, and someone who would literally marry Roxane Gay if she wasn't a woman. I might do it anyways, I swear to God. 

_(Audience laughs. Someone shouts 'Me too, Eddie!)_

The point is - you're okay. In this moment, you were okay. 

Or, I hope you are 'cause I made some pretty shitty jokes. And I've been getting looks from the guy in charge of camera one over here and I  _just_ realized that I probably wasn't supposed to swear? 

_(Audience laughs)_

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm leaving now. 

_(Dr. Kaspbrak stands and waves, setting down his mic and taking his bottle of water. He brushes past an assistant and swings a child onto his hip)_

 

"Professor Kaspbrak?"  

"Yeah?"

"Call for you on line one."

"From?"

"Sonia Kaspbrak."

Pause. 

"Thank you, Clark."

He lets his head fall forward into his hand. He'd forgotten, when he'd booked his flight and when he'd said yes to doing the talk that it was the day he left his mother. He'd realized while he was speaking, and felt a little bit of dread wash over him. His mother is going to call. She always does. 

And it didn't matter that it had been ten years since he had last seen her, because she always made his gut turn and his heartbeat pound. 

He picks up the phone, and presses the blinking line two button. 

"I told you not to call me at work, Sonia." 

"What the fuck, Eddie? I may be fucking your mom but that doesn't mean I sunk into that glorious woman and actually  _became_ her." 

Eddie starts and stops. " _Richie_?"

"The one and fucking only, Dr. K." Richie's voice is light and warm, free of Voices. He sounds a little nervous - there's a slight waver beneath his words, a bit of apprehension shaking his vowels between his teeth. "By the way, the whole being an incredibly successful doctor slash professor only makes you hotter, my dear."

Eddie makes an indignant noise. "I was definitely hot before, you asshole."

Richie hums in fake contemplation and Eddie can picture him tapping his chin, sliding his glasses up his nose. "You're right."

There's a softness to his voice that isn't what Eddie was expecting - it's an internal voice, one that Eddie usually hears when they're high, or when it's late at night and everyone else has fallen asleep. Or--

Eddie feels a blush rise to his cheeks and rolls his eyes.

Richie's not even in the same  _room_ and all he can think about is the sharp jut of his hipbones and the size of his hands, the lines of his neck and the hollowed bowls of his collarbones and the space above his breastbone. He gets stuck in it. In Richie's dark hair against his mouth and between his legs, in bad pick-up lines and an unending stream of praise and words that had Eddie blushing and whining in equal measure. He thinks about the first time they fucked, pressed together in Richie's bed, the day before the last final of their undergraduate degrees, Eddie at nineteen and Richie at twenty two, and how distant those years had seemed. He'd been on his back the first time, his wrists in Richie's (big) hands and his legs around his waist, on his hands and knees the second and third. He'd ridden Richie the fourth time, sprawled across the his thighs, tilting his head back against his shoulder and mouthing at a lean neck. He'd ridden Richie the fifth time, too, sat on his lap and kissed him as they both moaned. 

He'd woken up next morning to a warm coffee on his bedside table and a note saying something about an early final. 

That was seven years ago, and Eddie hasn't seen him since. 

"What the  _fuck_ , Tozier?" And it comes out so sharp and so vulnerable that Eddie winces, a little. But then he remembers who he's talking to and why he's angry and stops. 

"Unless you got kidnapped by a motherfucking killer clown, I don't want to hear whatever shitty excuse you've lined up for flirting with me for  _two years_ , fucking me for  _a day straight_  and then  _never speaking to me again_." 

"I'm - I'm so sorry, Eds."

Eddie closes his eyes. He breathes out, sharp and fast, a bit of a sob and a bit of a something-else and leans his head into his hand. 

He remembers Richie pointing out that he only did that when he was upset. He remembers paying enough attention to Richie to realize that he did the opposite - he tilted his head back, like the moon and the stars could save him. 

"No," Eddie says, and he barely recognizes his own voice, soft and heady - like warm hot chocolate made with honey. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't - I have no right to be angry with you." 

Richie laughs, and it's a bitter thing that hurts, just a little. "Yes, you do." 

Eddie pauses. "Well, you're right, I do, but I shouldn't have... shouted?"

"You're still short, angry and gay, Eds, I'd've been more surprised if you hadn't."

Eddie rolls his eyes. "Fuck off, Tozier." But his voice doesn't fit the words. He sounds sweet. It's so foreign he almost doesn't realize why until Richie makes a sound like an admission and all Eddie wants to do is ask what's wrong and if he can help. He hasn't heard his hot chocolate voice (Richie's name for it, too, he'd forgotten that) since the last time he saw Richie. 

"I saw your talk," Richie says and Eddie listens to him swallow. It's the showy swallow he does when he flirts. 

"Yeah?" 

"Yeah. It was good - amazing, actually. And I - I - I remembered that she used to call you, everyday on the anniversary of the day you left and I remembered how much you hated it. So I just..."

"Called." 

For a split second, Eddie wants to hit him. He wants to scream and berate him, wants to slap him across the face and demand why he dares to be so  _fucking_ caring. But then he remembers the freckles on Richie's shoulders and forearms and the slick of his mouth against his own. 

He sighs. "Fuck, 'Chee." 

A choked noise falls from Richie and through the telephone line. 

_Fuck, 'Chee, please._

_You're so fucking pretty when you beg, baby._

Eddie flushes. He coughs. "Sorry."

Richie clears his throat. "All good, Eds. Now - I called, actually, because well, I knew your fucking mother was going to call today, but also because um - it's Bill." 

"What about Bill?" 

"Well, he's finally confessed his undying love for me--" There's a muffled squawk and the sound of someone being hit. A smile cracks Eddie's face. "Bill! I can't believe you would do this to  _me_ , the love of your life--"

"Sh-Shut up, Richie!"

"Hi, Bill!" Eddie says, raising his voice a little. 

"Eddie says hi," Richie says. 

"I  _know_ , Richie, I c-can hear him." Bill's voice goes quiet and Eddie feels cold leak from his fingers. "Tuh-tell him about Georgie." 

Eddie squeaks, though he'll firmly deny making the noise later. " _Georgie_?" 

When he'd met Bill in first year in his first anatomy class, Bill had been quiet, withdrawn and his stutter had obscured every word that came out of his mouth. Bits and pieces through Richie and Beverly and Ben and Eddie had realized that Bill's little brother had gone missing.

Eddie realizes, with a start, that maybe that was why Bill refused to speak to or look at him for months - because he's small and brown-haired and seventeen, like Georgie was before he disappeared. 

"Yeah," Richie says, and it's lost any of the light it had. "They found him."

"Where?" Eddie asks. The words are hollow, because after ten years, there's no way he's alive. 

"In --" Richie voice breaks. Eddie inhales sharply. "In the sewers, under the well, right where Bill had always said he'd be." 

He hates being right. 

"Do they know--"

"He was missing a  _fucking arm,_ Eds. He - He'd been strangled and beaten and--" Richie's voice broke again, and Eddie knew what was coming, because there were very few things that you could do to a human body that upset Richie. 

"Raped," Eddie said, and closed his eyes. He leaned back in his chair and tilted his head back. He waved away the nurse who knocked on his door, his gaze not leaving the ceiling. 

He hated the word as much as Richie did, for different reasons. 

Richie had grown up with Beverly, his best friend, his ex-girlfriend, too, who'd spent years being raped and abused by her own father. And then he'd met Eddie, had roomed with him in university and become best friends with him, and learned that he'd spent years being raped and abused by  _his_  mother. 

There's nothing Richie hates more than being unable to help someone he cared about.  

"God, Eddie, I can't fucking imagine what Bill is feeling right now. I mean I grew up with him, with him and Georgie and he was like a little brother to me, but he wasn't actually--"

"You're allowed to be in as much pain as Bill, sweetheart, it's not a competition." 

Richie laughs, sniffles. "Did you just call me sweetheart?" 

"Yeah," Eddie says, and smiles. "I just called you sweetheart."

Richie goes quiet, and there's a depth to the silence that Eddie hadn't quite heard before. "You've never called me that before." 

"I would've," Eddie says, and glances at his right hand, at the tan line he still had from a wedding band he'd stopped wearing years ago, and the tattoo on the third finger of his left hand, a wave cresting beneath his knuckle. There's a matching tattoo on Richie's finger, a joke between the two of them, a promise. Eddie hadn't realized they looked like wedding rings until Caspar had brought it up on their first date, eyebrow raised and a joke about cheating on their tongue. "I would've had time to call you sweetheart if--"

"--If I hadn't left."

"Yes," Eddie whispers. He can't stop the words that pushed over his tongue. "Why did you leave?" 

Richie exhales, long and slow and shakey and Eddie imagines the ground trembling as he did so, like the awakening of a very old, very ancient beast. "Because I was using." 

Eddie frowns. He'd seen the poorly hidden needles (always fresh out of packages, never dirty, never used twice, never shared), and the stacks of rolling papers and mason jars filled with pot. He'd smelled what came rolling off Richie in waves when he was home - whiskey and tequila and the burnt-sugar smell of heroine and the icing sugar on his upper lip and his nose and the bright roundness to his eyes. 

"I know," Eddie says, confused. "I knew you were using, Rich." 

Eddie had spent weeks after Richie had left bouncing between indignant and hurt. He'd wondered why he'd left - a girlfriend, a crisis, a sudden and horrible realization that Eddie wasn't someone he wanted or could ever want and  _God_ why did he even have sex with him in the first place? Though Eddie knew that Richie wanted him - he'd stumbled over his words when he saw Eddie in his shorts, sometimes, and often watched his ass and mouth, and his eyes had gone dark when Eddie bickered with him, when it got heavy, flirtatious - the last one had been the one he'd thought about the most. He knew that Richie didn't have a girlfriend, and that he was perfectly comfortable in his queerness. Which left only the possibility that Richie didn't want him. That he'd been a mistake - a good fuck, at the most, but nothing more. 

It'd hurt more than Eddie had thought it could. He'd cowered into himself, gotten angry for cowering, and lashed out, flung himself into school and sex and forgetting Rich Tozier. It didn't work, of course, but then he met Caspar and he could pretend it did. 

But Richie was telling him it'd been the booze and the drugs, and that he'd left to protect Eddie. He knew that it ultimately would've hurt far more to be in a relationship with an addict than to fuck once and be forgotten. He left to protect him. 

Eddie hates him, just a little.  

"What?"

Eddie laughs, though it was soft and spent, distinctly unhappy - the worst kind of laughter. "Richie, I grew up with a hypochondriac mother and I spent seven years in medical school, did you really think I didn't recognize what marijuana, excessive drinking and heroine and cocaine addictions looked like?" 

"Oh," Richie says. He makes a noise like a question, and then says, "Why the fuck did you sleep with me if you knew I was using? What if--"

"You didn't."  _Get me sick._  "And I slept with you even though I knew you were using because I was in love with you, and I was stupid and I thought I could fucking fix you." 

Eddie had known in a distant, indistinct kind of way that he was in love with Richie. Everyone had known. But he'd never said it out loud. 

He'd certainly never said it to Richie. 

"You were in love with me." 

"Yes," Eddie says, even though it wasn't a question. "I was."

Richie pauses. "Are you still?"

"I have three degrees, two children and an ex-spouse, Richie."

"What does that have to do with you being in love with me?"

"Nothing!" Eddie snaps. "Nothing, Richie!" 

_But it should be_ everywhere,  _because what if I never fell out of love with you? What if I said I loved someone but I always loved you? What if I married someone I never loved? What if I lost you forever and I'll just be in love with you forever?_

"I was in love with you, too. And - before you interrupt me you fiery little nerd - I didn't just call because it was the day I knew your mom was going to call, or because of Georgie - though Bill is trying to laugh and cry at the same time, which is super cute - and he really wants me to let you know that the wake is this Friday and that he really wants you to come--"

"A-And I luh-loved your tuh-TED talk!" Bill says. 

"--And that it's the seven year anniversary of me being a sad, drugless and booze-less asshole." 

"Thanks, Bill! Wait, why seven?" Eddie asks, pride bubbling behind his ears, being stubborn and mouthy even though he should be congratulated him--

"'Cause our room was number 702 in building 7A and when we all together, there were seven of us. So. Seven years." 

Eddie's mouth falls open, and then, "Fuck, I love you.

Richie laughs, an undercurrent of relief palpable in the sound. "I know." 

"Oh, fuck off, I am not in the mood for  _Star Wars_ references."

"You're always in the nerd for  _Star Wars_  references, Leia, don't deny it. And Eds?"

"Yeah, Rich?" 

"Your birthday is December seventh." The softness in his voice  _hurts_. "And you were seventeen when we met."  

Eddie opens his mouth to respond, and only gets the dial tone. He pulls the phone away from his ear and stares at it, mouth fishing. 

"Dr. Kaspbrak, your pager's been going off for fifteen minutes, they need they you in trauma one," Clark says, throwing his office door open, fixing him with a frown. 

He jerks and rushes into the chaos of the hospital, snapping gloves onto his hands demanding information on what the fuck is going on before he really processes the movements. 

Someone barks at him, and someone else makes a quip about being glad to see his ass in those scrubs. 

And before he catches himself and raises an unimpressed eyebrow, he almost calls them Richie. 

 

Georgie's wake is three and a half hours of laughter, because he hasn't seen these people since he graduated and God, he loves every single one of them, and three and a half hours of tears, because Georgie was seventeen and they'll probably never know who killed him. 

His reunion with Richie is unexpected - he was prepared for yelling, or some light mockery, an arm arond his shoulder - not a quiet look and three long strides until Richie's hugging him, collapsing into a chair and pulling Eddie into his lap, his face buried in his neck. "Eddie, baby," is the only thing he says, and he smooths a kiss across Eddie's temple. "I missed you," Eddie breaths, his breath somewhere in his stomach. 

Bill has that clenched jaw thing that he only does when he's trying not to cry and Eddie pulls him into a hug, presses a long kiss to his cheek. Mike and Stan both kiss his cheeks and give him long, tired smiles. Their eyes flicker to Bill, more often than they don't. Ben and Bev wrap him in a hug in the same moment and Bev kisses the corner of his mouth, ruffles his hair. "Dr. Kaspbrak!" She teases and hugs him again. 

Predictably, they go for drinks afterwards, and drink like they haven't since first year of university and dance like they won't embarrass themselves, even though they definitely are. 

Ben and Bev - who are engaged and invite the others to their wedding with sly grins - disappear first, after Richie whistles one too many times as they dance and make out with equal fervour. Mike and Bill and Stan follow, after they'd sandwiched Bill between them, attached themselves to his neck and mouths, grinded into his hips and his ass and Richie had shared a very pink-cheeked look with Eddie. 

It leaves Eddie and Richie, like it always does. 

Neither of them have had more than a glass of whiskey (Eddie) and a couple glasses of expensive-smelling red wine (Richie), and Richie gives Eddie a long, slow look that makes his breath catch a little in his throat. 

Richie swirls his glass and throws it back, wiping his mouth as the base falls on the bar with a delicate noise. 

He doesn't say anything. 

Eddie lets his eyes drag over the fullness of Richie's mouth and the way his hair curls over his forehead and into his eyes, the way his hands, long-fingered and graceful, spread across the bar. He meets Richie's eyes. Raises an eyebrow. 

"Are we going somewhere, Trashmouth?" He asks. 

"Anywhere you like, Eds," Richie whispers, and he's part-way to Eddie mouth, leaning down, leaning forward into his space. He presses a long, taking kind of kiss to Eddie's open mouth and pulls away before he can respond. Eddie blinks at him. "But preferably my room. 307, baby boy." Richie winks when Eddie shivers. And he swings his suit jacket over his shoulder and nods at the bartender and leaves, his head tilted forward a little, a long-limbed silhouette in a nine hundred dollar suit, with a walk like a runway model. 

Eddie glances down at his white dress shirt, his brown slacks and black converse, at the tweed jacket with the grey suede elbow patches he's been wearing since first year university. At the whiskey on the bar. He leaves twenty bucks beneath the glass, brushes rough fingers through his hair and pulls his jacket onto his shoulders. 

He doesn't want this to be a one-time thing, not again. He can't have all of Richie's body and Richie's mouth and Richie's voice in his ear and then never see him again. His gut twists and he closes his eyes, leans into the stool behind. 

"He's been in love with since first year, you know." A voice mutters, coupled with an arm reaching past Eddie's shoulder to nab a corked bottle of Champagne. He looks up into Stan's face, smooth and sharp, a little cold. Stan raises an eyebrow. "I don't know why the fuck you aren't up Rich's room, getting your brains fucked out and getting at least a couple noise complaints. You can angst in the morning, when he brings you breakfast and calls you baby and you realize that he's in love with you and that he's not fucking going anywhere." 

Eddie gaps. 

Stan shrugs and raises the bottle of Champagne. "But that's just my two cents." 

And then he's gone, talking the stairs to the lobby two at a time. 

Eddie takes the stairs one at a time, presses the button for the elevator, waits for the elevator, gets in the elevator, contemplates going to the fourth floor, to his room, before he promptly decides that's a terrible idea and hitting the numerical three behind he can chicken out. He spends the thirty seconds to takes to get to the third floor chewing on his nails. He stands outside room three-oh-seven and chews on his bottom lip. 

He knocks. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> lemme know what you think and come bother me with prompts and stuff at gay-for-roxane


End file.
